Reports the findings of experiments that suggest that much of perception, even to high interpretive levels, is automatic and independent of intention or consciousness, and that the production of words in reading may involve problems that have nothing to do with articulation, even if the words have been identified. (GT)

Describes a study of the visual discrimination abilities of children who varied in their ability to recognize words. Indicates that visual discrimination skills of the type needed to discriminate between single artificial graphemes do not seem essential for the word recognition aspect of reading. (TJ)

Study examined causal priorities between comprehension subskills in three types of readers and found that for most readers word meanings do serve as building blocks of paragraph meaning.

Listeners shadowed lists of words or parts of sentences, and shadowing latencies were recorded. The effect of attended context was interpreted as a result of strategical manipulation of response bias (a resource-limited process), whereas unattended context may be effective through spreading excitation in semantic memory (a data-limited process).…

Assesses some phonological tasks of well compensated, high-functioning dyslexics, aged 18, whose reading ability had improved to within one standard deviation of the normal population. Compares them with matched controls. Finds they performed well on word recognition tests but worse on nonword reading and spelling, and worse (in terms of speed) on…

Describes how kindergarten children in literature-based classrooms listen to stories again and again during shared readings by teachers, and then they pretend-read the stories on their own. Uses hierarchical regression to explore relationships among factors, such as one-to-one correspondence concepts and automaticity in letter name recognition.…

Finds that orthographic information dominated word recognition of both good and poor readers and that both semantic contexts and text difficulty influenced the reading of target words. Shows that good readers used orthographic information more than did poor readers, whereas poor readers used semantic context more than good readers. Finds support…

Examines three experiments about how readers combine immediate sentence context with information presented earlier in a paragraph in processing words in text. Finds that discourse information operates interactively with local context to affect readers' expectations for and processing of upcoming words. (MG)

Considers the prospects and need for a psychologically plausible connectionist model of the development of word recognition skills. Emphasizes the importance of phonological skills as precursors and facilitators of learning to read. Argues that it may be possible to develop a connectionist model which will be more consistent with evidence from…

Investigates context effects for words with more than one meaning. Finds that younger children (third graders) were more sensitive to the sentence context in which an ambiguous word appears, whereas the processing of older children (sixth graders) was determined more by the relative frequencies of the word meanings. (RS)

Multi-level hierarchical linear modeling was used to compare growth curves for children receiving instruction aimed at single orthographic-phonological connections. Growth rate on phonics probes was significantly faster for the group receiving multiple-connections treatment. Urges school psychologists to recommend multiple strategies for helping…

Investigates causes of high and low reading achievement among elementary students using a causal model. Finds support for the model. Notes an implication of the model is that teaching and learning relevant to improving listening comprehension and word identification proximally affect verbal knowledge and pronunciation knowledge, and distally…

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the study of reading and reading disability with the use of functional neuroimaging techniques. There is substantial converging evidence that skilled word recognition requires the development of a highly integrated cortical system that includes left hemisphere dorsal, ventral, and anterior…

The authors examined word skipping in reading in 2 experiments. In Experiment 1, skipping rates were higher for a preview of a predictable word than for a visually similar nonword, indicating there is full recognition in parafoveal vision. In Experiment 2, foveal load was manipulated by varying the frequency of the word preceding either a 3-letter…

To examine the nature of forward saccadic eye movements in reading, eye movement records were collected from college students as they read a short passage. Forward saccades from this data set were analyzed to determine factors influencing the likelihood of any given letter in the text being the recipient of the next fixation. Data indicated that…